Riverbed enhanced its SteelCentral monitoring platform, added new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and integrated it with the WiFi access points on its Riverbed Xirrus platform.

As  part of the upgrade, Riverbed combined its application performance management (APM) with end-user monitoring and made it a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.  It is now referring to this as unified application performance. The unified application performance also combines the license structure between the APM and end-user management.

Formerly, SteelCentral obtained information from the end-user experience, infrastructure, application, and network and provided details on network performance across the environment. However, the new release enhances the APM and end-user management capabilities by troubleshooting each transaction, analyzing the business impact of performance issues, and resolving them.

The reason for this, says Riverbed is that with merely APM, users don’t get a complete view and often have to choose between quality of data and scalability. The unified technology fills these “blind spots” and now compresses data, takes advantage of a clustered architecture, and offers a single analysis server to monitor the environment.

Erik Hille, Riverbed product marketing director, said it creates a more flexible structure for Riverbed customers. He gives the example of a company that is trying to move its applications to a SaaS-first policy, which APM would be poorly suited to manage.

“With this license structure, a company can simply move the license into EUEM and maintain monitoring of the SaaS-based application. Ultimately, therefore, the measures of success is the ability to meet the strategic initiative, a lower IT risk associated with performance, and a lower cost to measure this performance,” said Hille.

And by unifying these two aspects of its monitoring, end-users can better manage and monitor other initiatives such as cloud migration, data center consolidation, or the addition of a branch office.

The added AI capabilities enable more efficient data collection, analysis, and visualization on the platform. The integration with Riverbed Xirrus WiFi access points, “improves the ability to manage this domain proactively and provides additional telemetry where the need for troubleshooting arises,” said Hille.

Riverbed SteelCentral is built natively into its SteelConnect SD-WAN platform. In February, the company also integrated Xirrus WiFi points and added new connectivity options to its SD-WAN. Riverbed’s new strategies with SD-WAN have allowed it to gain new market share, according to an IHS report.